Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Interfacial tension of crude oil-water system with imidazolium and lactam-based ionic liquids and their evaluation for enhanced oil recovery under high saline environment
    (01-03-2017)
    Sakthivel, Sivabalan
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    Velusamy, Sugirtha
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    Nair, Vishnu Chandrasekharan
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    Sharma, Tushar
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    Matured reservoirs are being targeted for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations in the hope to recover the residual oil that remains trapped within the porous media. Chemical enhanced oil recovery is one of the successful oil recovery methods which is being employed for the recovery of the residual oil. Many of the conventional chemicals fail to perform under high temperature and high saline reservoir conditions. These situations lead to the search for alternate flooding techniques which could efficiently produce the crude oil to the surface. The present work investigates a possible solution for the recovery of trapped crude oil using lactam and imidazolium based ionic liquids (ILs) specifically targeted towards recovery in high saline environment. Initially, the interfacial tension of the crude oil-water system has been investigated using various chemical agents, such as sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), and six different ILs at varying high saline concentrations as a function of temperature (283.15–353.15 K). Subsequently, flooding experiments with only polymer, only SDS, only IL, SDS + polymer and IL + polymer at zero and high saline conditions were performed. It was observed that the IL + polymer flood performed very well in both zero and high salinity conditions as compared to all other flooding systems. The present investigation also portrays an intuition on the evaluation of ILs based on their alkyl chain length.
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    Publication
    Enhanced microbial degradation of waxy crude oil: A review on current status and future perspective
    (01-01-2017)
    Sakthipriya, N.
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    Most of the crude oil reservoirs in the world are getting matured leading to the increased production and deposition of long chain paraffins (wax) at subsurface and surface facilities creating a challenge for flow assurance and safer operation. Deposition of wax on the inner walls of the pipelines tends to decrease the flow of crude oil thereby causing billions of dollars of loss. This article reviews in detail about the various aspects of the microbial degradation of waxy crude oil, along with different mechanisms involved in the hydrocarbon degradation. In addition, the article acts as a guide to screen the microorganism suitable for different environmental conditions for their applications in pipelines, oil spill remediation and microbial-based enhanced oil recovery technique to waxy and heavy oil reservoirs for environmentally safe operation.
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    Publication
    Production performance of water alternate gas injection techniques for enhanced oil recovery: Effect of WAG ratio, number of WAG cycles and the type of injection gas
    (01-01-2014)
    Bhatia, Jigar
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    Srivastava, J. P.
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    Sharma, Abhay
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    Production performance of a water alternate gas injection (WAG) method has been reported for the effect of several operating parameters, such as, WAG injection cycles, viz., single cycle WAG and five-cycle WAG and the tapered WAG at the reservoir conditions of 120°C and 230 kg/cm2 for hydrocarbon gas and CO2 gas. It is observed that the number of cycles in the WAG injection process affects the recovery of oil from the core sample. It is of oil initially in place. The observations on the effect of gases revealed that the CO2 gas with five-cycle WAG process gives higher incremental recovery than the five cycle WAG process using hydrocarbon gas. It is observed that the saturation profile of CO2 WAG injection shows the better gas saturation in the core as against the hydrocarbon gas in the WAG process. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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    Publication
    Comparative effectiveness of production performance of Pickering emulsion stabilized by nanoparticle-surfactant-polymerover surfactant-polymer (SP) flooding for enhanced oil recoveryfor Brownfield reservoir
    (01-05-2015)
    Sharma, Tushar
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    Nanotechnology offers potential benefits for improving the next-generation enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process from Brownfield reservoirs. In our recent study (Sharma et al., 2014a), we formulated novel Pickering emulsion stabilized using conventional oilfield polymer polyacrylamide (PAM) and nanoparticles (SiO2 and clay) in the presence of surfactant, which is thermally stable at elevated temperature and suitable for EOR application. In this study, the use of these Pickering emulsion is investigated for enhanced oil recovery. Two types of flood systems, viz., surfactant-polymer (SP) and o/w Pickering emulsion flood, are prepared and used for 12 core flooding experiments to study the additional oil recovery at reservoir pressure of 13.6MPa and temperature ranges from 313 to 363K. These reservoir conditions of pressure and temperature are representative to one of the mature reservoirs in India. The incorporation of nanoparticle was observed to provide relatively lower and stable interfacial tension (IFT) for the Pickering emulsion. The viscosity of SP system was observed to decrease with temperature (313-363K), while that of Pickering emulsion was observed to remain stable and thereby indicating a possible stable mobility ratio downhole during EOR. Nanoparticle stabilized Pickering emulsion observed to give enhanced oil recovery by about 80% more at elevated temperatures as compared to conventional SP flood, showing promising advantages of employment of nanoparticles in oilfield industry. The investigation on the permeability reduction indicated a relatively larger retention of SiO2 nanoparticle than its counterpart clay, which is attributed to its larger size in the system.
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    Publication
    Use of Oil-in-water Pickering Emulsion Stabilized by Nanoparticles in Combination with Polymer Flood for Enhanced Oil Recovery
    (17-09-2015)
    Sharma, T.
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    Velmurugan, N.
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    Patel, P.
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    Chon, B. H.
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    Efficient flooding agents are required to produce additional oil from mature reservoir. In this work, oil-in-water Pickering emulsion systems stabilized using nanoparticles, surfactant, and polymer have been developed and tested for enhanced oil recovery with and without a conventional polymer flood. Stability of nanoparticles in the dispersion of surfactant-polymer solution was tested using zeta-potential before use. Several flooding experiments have been conducted using Berea core samples at 13.6 MPa and temperatures of 313 and 353 K. It has been observed that a combination of 0.5 PV polymer flood with 0.5 PV Pickering emulsion was efficient and have resulted in 1-6% additional oil recovery as compared to 0.5 PV Pickering emulsion flooding alone. The injection of polymer flood have shown to enhance the pressure drop in the core sample after emulsion flooding and considered as an important factor for an additional recovery of oil. The effect of temperature on the viscosity of flooding agents in relation to pressure drop and oil recovery have also been investigated. Viscosity and pressure drop of emulsion flood systems have shown to marginally decrease with increase in temperature. Studies on nanoparticle retention using SEM have shown that nanoparticles were retained in the core sample during emulsion flooding which may be detrimental for permeability of core sample. It is observed that Pickering emulsion flood with polymer flood would be effective for the enhanced oil recovery suitable for matured reservoirs.